Hacklab Ghana Developer Census 2020 is the first and most comprehensive survey of people who code in Ghana. In 2020, the Hacklab Foundation fielded a survey covering everything from developers’ favorite technologies to their job preferences. This marks the first of annual surveys to be published. This maiden edition witnessed the participation of 272 developers who took the 20-minute survey earlier between November - December 2020.
Despite our survey’s reach and capacity for informing valuable conclusions, we acknowledge that our results don’t represent everyone in the Ghana developer community evenly. We have further work to do to make the Hacklab Ghana Developer Census 2020 a more inclusive, diverse platform, and a reflection in the community at large.
We are committed to building on steps we have taken and improving the coverage, insights and beyond in the coming years to better improve the support and interventions needed to give developers a more enabling ecosystem to thrive. Some of these survey results directly guide those efforts. To address the characteristics of our data, be sure to check out where we summarize results by developer persona (Professional, Student, Hobbyists) or gender, highlight results for underrepresented racial/ethnic groups, or use survey weighting to correct for demographic skew.
We looked at breakdowns by demographics throughout our analysis and its reflection of the distribution of talents.
Want to dive into the results yourself? The anonymized results of the survey are available for download under the Open Database License (ODbL). We look forward to seeing what you find!
This maiden edition could not have been successful without the contributions of Twitter and CorrelAid.
Here are a few of the top takeaways from this year’s results.
1. Low Female Representation:
Of the 272 respondents, 17% indicated being women. Only 10% of the 130 professional developers are women. However, this percentage has the potential to increase in the upcoming years as 24% of the 84 students are women. Learn more.
2. Geographical Concentration:
70% of the respondents are from the Greater Accra Region. Explore the map.
3. Most Used Languages:
HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Python, and SQL are the most used languages by Ghanaian developers. Learn more about the popularity of other languages and the preferences of professional developers here.
4. Most Familiar Frameworks:
React.js is the most used web framework. Node.js is also a widely used framework. Learn more.
5. Strong Developers’ Communities:
Of the numerous communities listed by the respondents (122), the three largest communities to which they indicated membership were DevCongress (13.6%), Facebook Developer Circle (9.6%), and the Hacklab Foundation (7.4%). See all the communities.
6. Highest Level of Education:
The vast majority of the respondents have at least a secondary high school degree, and 70% indicated having a Bachelor’s degree. Only 4% indicated having a Master’s degree. Learn more.
7. Primary Field of Study:
Most participants study or studied Computer Science or Computer Engineering (55%), followed by Information Technology (11.6%) and Business (5.4%). Learn more.
8. Overtime & Compensation:
62% of the respondents indicated receiving a monthly salary lower than 2000 GHS, this percentage drops to 47.5% for respondents who indicated being professional developers. Around 50% of the respondents work overtime on 3 or more days in a week.
Learn more about the working conditions and salaries of the respondents.
The two largest subgroups among the respondents are professional developers and students. Additionally, there are respondents coding as a part of their work, coding as a hobby, as well as former developers.
For the remainder of this report, we use these categories, specifically students and professional developers, to highlight particular differences between participants.
Most of the respondents code as a hobby. Interestingly, professional developers seem to code for a hobby less often than students which may be related to their reduced time availability.
Most of the respondents are full-time employees and there is also a great share of students. A significant share of the respondents are unemployed and looking for work.
When it comes to gender differences, there is a greater share of students among the female respondents. In addition, women seem to be less often self-employed than men.
Most respondents come from the Greater Accra Region. The extent of this concentration in Accra seems to be larger for professional developers than for students.
City of the respondents. Zoom in to get a more detailed picture.
Hover over the individual markers to see the professional status of the respondents.
Most respondents are between 20 and 30 years old.
While the students are very young in most cases, the professional developers display a little more variance in their ages. However, we have a very young sample at hand.
There is a greater share of women among the students than among the professional developers.
Ghana’s developer community may thus become more representative in the upcoming years.
Among our respondents, women seem to have dependents they care for less often than men do. This may partly be due to the fact, that more women are still in their studies and that the women in our sample may be younger than the men.
These are the technologies with which the respondents have done extensive development work over the past year.
HTML/CSS is the most used language, followed by JavaScript, Python, and SQL. Professional developers are more likely to use JavaScript and SQL. C++ and C are still widely used to teach coding to students.
Windows is the most widely used development platform; thanks, notably, to its success among students. WordPress, Android, Linux, and Heroku are also widely used.
React.js is the most popular web framework.
Node.js is a popular “back-end” environment.
GitHub is by far the most popular version control tool. Slack is the most used business communication platform.
This network graph shows which technologies are mostly used together by the respondents. Every time a respondent mentioned using technologies, a link is drawn between them on the graph. Well-connected technologies on the graph, having many “co-uses”, are thus technologies frequently used together by the respondents. The size of the nodes (bubbles) shows the number of respondents using each technology.